Bosch to pay VW diesel owners $330 million in emission scandal too

With a judge set to weigh in on the settlement VW Group negotiated with its 3.0-liter V-6 diesel owners, Volkswagen seems to have settled most of the U.S. legal claims stemming from its diesel-emission cheating scandal.

Total costs in the U.S. alone are now more than $20 billion, and among other penalties, VW has pleaded guilty to three felony counts of criminal misconduct under U.S. law.

But another settlement with VW diesel owners has gotten much less attention.

It's by global auto supplier Bosch, which sells billions of dollars of parts to VW Group all over the world—and which wrote the "defeat device" software VW used to trick the EPA tests.

According to court documents filed two days ago when the 3.0-liter V-6 diesel settlement was revealed, the German company will pay out $327.5 million to U.S. owners of Audi, Porsche, and Volkswagen diesel vehicles.

Under the settlement, $163.3 million of that is for the owners of almost half a million 2.0-liter 4-cylinder TDI diesels sold by VW and Audi between 2009 and 2015.

In that article, the newspaper noted that none of Volkswagen's thousands of engineers knew how to write the "defeat device" software that would cheat the emission tests.

The company was deeply nervous about that role, the article said.

It noted that Bosch wrote a letter in June 2008 "demanding that Volkswagen agree to pay any penalties if they were discovered using a defeat device."

Bosch said in court documents that the letter has been misinterpreted and applied to different engines—those involved in the Volkswagen diesel scandal—than the ones the company intended it to refer to.

Bosch's woes in connection to the Volkswagen diesel scandal are far from over, however.

The company is still the subject of criminal inquiries in the U.S. and Germany, and the target of numerous civil suits from Volkswagen owners in several European countries.

Bosch will “continue to defend its interests in all other civil and criminal law proceedings," it said yesterday in a statement, and that it would "cooperate comprehensively with the investigating authorities in Germany and in other countries.”